Probably shouldn’t have spent the last half century paying them less than everyone else.
No shortage of people willing to learn. Recently overheard a conversation regarding recruitment and expansion for a tech department in my work, and it was made very clear that the shortage is with the seniors. Companies have to compete with each other for salary to try and entice them – assuming they haven’t moved to America.
You can’t grow the sector without the talent to teach them.
Whilst of course not representative of the entire industry, the feel in my network is that there’s plenty of great talent and that the problem lay in businesses setting silly expectations and waiting for something better. When you’re constantly saying “nah, we think we can do better” better never comes. There are issues too in location, which the article highlights, and which you’d think would be solved by the push for remote working but there’s still a lot of hold-outs to that. Couple the two of those with _broadly_ shitty working environments and the relative job-insecurity that comes with jumping ship during a cost-of-living crisis, and the end result is that fewer people are applying for new jobs and those that do are presently more likely to be rejected because they’re “not good enough.” The industry is a mess right now.
Some companies take the piss out of their IT staff with stupid rules. Work them to death practically and not caring about their employees. With low IT budgets and unrealistic targets. No wonder loads of people hate working in tech support from L1 to L4. CEOs, Directors and managers need to up their game.
IR35 you cunts… you could give us contracts that are outside and we’d be able to have a take home that makes it worthwhile whilst you pay no difference.
Instead they moan and hire Accenture instead for 3x the cost for 3x lower skills.
Fuck them.
When companies stop paying what’s essentially pennies to do/have like 3 different specialties in a single role (you can’t expect someone to work efficiently as a full stack engineer, cloud architect AND somehow manage/know essentially intermediate knowledge about DevOps).
It also doesn’t help that on the job training is a lost art on companies outside of like apprentice/internships. Out of all the industries in existence, Tech is the one place you’re guaranteed to find people who learn things quite quickly compared to other industries. Yes, 90% of them, me included, will have the social skills of a rock but we are damn good at what we do!
Don’t even get me started on trying to force Agile methodologies in a software development cycle. That’s a rant for another day 😂
No shortage of talent.
The shortage is in companies with sensible IT systems and reasonable expectations of what programmers can be experts in. If you’re using a platform that 0.1% of developers know and you can’t find staff, maybe try switching to a platform that 10% of developers know instead of bemoaning a ‘lack of talent’.
Employers outside the tech space frequently don’t seem to understand that it’s an employee’s market. They frequently treat their tech employees much like non-tech employees.
This obviously isn’t a bad thing in and of itself but they’re competing with tech companies with flexible hours, fewer hours, WFH, higher pay, great benefits and personal-project time. I went from an SME (in the engineering space) to a massive multinational and they SME just didn’t understand that if they wanted to keep me, they needed to be flexible with me.
The managers were all from manufacturing backgrounds and mandated that you were in your seat writing software bang on with the same shift in the workshop. They captured KPIs like lines of documentation written per hour, lines of code per hour, not understanding that that absolutely isn’t how it works.
I see the same from several of the companies we now work with and I hear it often from the endless bloody linkedin recruiters
They’re obviously free to treat and pay their tech employees however they see fit, but don’t then get surprised when they move on to either a tech company here or abroad for a better time.
​
​
Edit: I should add, there’s nothing “better” about tech employees that mean they should get treated better and one solution would be to treat *all* employees better, but companies just have more competition for their tech employees specifically.
Awesome
Now I can demand astronomical salaries and get away with being unpleasant to recruiters
Can’t be fucked to read the article, but I bet there’s not a shortage of tech talent. I bet there’s just a ton of employers who can’t afford or won’t pay fair salaries for tech talent.
I work in biotech rather than tech tech but I imagine its pretty much exactly the same story. No shortage of talent but companies somehow expect to be able to recruit people with a wide range of globally in-demand skills, working what realistically should be 2 or even 3 jobs worth of responsibilities, working quite a lot of unpaid extra hours, for a salary package that would make a retail middle manager blush.
I have to keep repeating I feel like we’re at a point in this country where unless you wind up in literally one or two distinct sectors like FinTech, you genuinely just might as well not bother upskilling all it does is land you more stressful and demanding work while your salary still flat lines. I don’t understand why this isn’t being seen as a serious issue while we’re talking about developing a “high skill, high wage” economy, its a complete farce.
There’s never a shortage of talent.
There’s only ever a shortage of wages and training opportunities.
Firms need to learn to compete. 15 years of more people than jobs has allowed their HR departments to get flabby.
Pay more, easy. I’m very new to the field but I can tell I’ll be working overtime and doing shit I’m not supposed to just because it falls under IT thus “hardware software networks azure, isn’t it all the same mate?”
I work in IT and i’m currently looking for new opportunities as I don’t feel I am paid fairly for the role I complete. The problem i’m having looking at new roles isn’t even pay because i’m not getting far enough to have that discussion.
Out of all of the jobs that are advertised within an IT capacity, i’d say a good 80% have truly ridiculous job specifications. They advertise these roles out which have enough responsibilities and requirements to cover at least two separate roles, if not more!
They’re quite clearly not going to have any joy recruiting anyone because in their eyes, there’s a tech talent shortage caused by their own prerequisites! If they actually advertised the roles out that would suit the workload of one person, they’d be interviewing people left, right and centre!
Eh, I know a senior support/projects IT team which is currently hiring at a good rate locally – 40k. But the guys I know are on 32 and 35k respectively, and have been offered 5% increases. So of course they’re looking to leave, and the company ends up with a shortage of expertise.
I swear if HR ever worked out that perhaps treating external recruitment differently from internal recruitment is a massive mistake, half the issues they have would vanish.
Edit – should add that I’ve just jumped ship for a 10% rise amongst other better benefits and am leaving the local office with no IT support at all. The absolute state of HR these days
As one of the “tech talent” I guess, I am considering leaving the UK for the horrible state of politics. I can get a job probably anywhere, probably higher paying. Also the recent exodus from london due to WFH and rent hikes in my city arent helping.
I wonder where all the talent went :/
The businesses that pay more and get the talent will thrive, those that hold out for more cheap immigrant labour to exploit will die, there are no problems here.
They don’t pay very well at entry level, yet still demand years of experience.
We get offers we can’t refuse from other countries, visa included. Wilier governments than ours are taking full advantage of the brain drain: Brexit was the best thing ever to happen to the Canadian tech industry.
Amsterdam is a much better choice for anyone wanting a European base now: they speak better English than we do, it’s in the EU and it’s on the continent proper.
These articles are meant to prepare people for loosening immigration rules to admit cheap tech workforce from 3rd world countries (read about overton window).
There is no talent shortage, just corporations boasting about billions in profits offer shit pay and are upset nobody wants to work for them.
They now lobby politicians to give in and bring in cheap workforce.
Of course we will pay for this – more queues to your GP, higher rents etc.
only so that big corporations can save millions.
Not this again.
There is NO UK talent shortage in tech.
What we have is a ton of employers not willing to pay for the skills they need.
There’s no shortage, you just have to pay. Remote working means that local companies hoping to get cheap devs now have to compete with companies listed on the NYSE who can afford to pay twice as much.
The pay for tech staff has to keep rising, but getting senior mnagement to agree to that is the main issue. The less they spend on experienced staff = more profit made.
“An apprenticeship is a fantastic way to achieve that. Not just for young people, but also those looking to upskill.”
Lol. Yeh, if you live with your parents. A lot of people are willing to financially struggle to upskill, but nobody can live on 6K a year. I don’t know why the government doesn’t allow all apprentices to be on universal credit, for the first year of the apprenticeship (when the pay is less than min wage). Subsidising their income to reach min wage would still be cheaper than paying unemployed people, but you upskill people so they have more reliable work and they’re less likely to be unemployed in the future. Right now, if you take an apprenticeship you’re going to be taking a risk, because until you start the job you won’t know if you’ll be able to get universal credit to survive or not.
**”tech talent shortage**” is corporate speak for “employees who refuse pay well below their market value”
The only shortage here is the amount of £ companies are willing to pay out, small violin anyone?
There’s a weird disconnect in this thread… Everyone seems to think we’re losing all of our talent to the Bay Area and Dubai, but that just isn’t true.
We’re suffering from a lack of available talent, not applicants.
The tl;dr is – university is so prohibitively expensive now, and engineering courses have such a high drop out rate that we simply aren’t creating the talent needed to power these industries.
The other side of the coin is Brexit and the VISA backlog making it a nightmare to get non-natives into role in a reasonable amount of time.
London is still the most popular city for tech in the world and yet we’ve decided to give ourselves a shotgun to the foot in the form of a slack jawed electorate that are happy to vote these people out of jobs and then complain about the upshot.
Fuck ’em.
Yeah, maybe if you’re both good and lucky enough you’ll be on £300k in 20 years, who’s to say by that time £300k doesn’t mean you’re house sharing with 7 strangers.
28 comments
Probably shouldn’t have spent the last half century paying them less than everyone else.
No shortage of people willing to learn. Recently overheard a conversation regarding recruitment and expansion for a tech department in my work, and it was made very clear that the shortage is with the seniors. Companies have to compete with each other for salary to try and entice them – assuming they haven’t moved to America.
You can’t grow the sector without the talent to teach them.
Whilst of course not representative of the entire industry, the feel in my network is that there’s plenty of great talent and that the problem lay in businesses setting silly expectations and waiting for something better. When you’re constantly saying “nah, we think we can do better” better never comes. There are issues too in location, which the article highlights, and which you’d think would be solved by the push for remote working but there’s still a lot of hold-outs to that. Couple the two of those with _broadly_ shitty working environments and the relative job-insecurity that comes with jumping ship during a cost-of-living crisis, and the end result is that fewer people are applying for new jobs and those that do are presently more likely to be rejected because they’re “not good enough.” The industry is a mess right now.
Some companies take the piss out of their IT staff with stupid rules. Work them to death practically and not caring about their employees. With low IT budgets and unrealistic targets. No wonder loads of people hate working in tech support from L1 to L4. CEOs, Directors and managers need to up their game.
IR35 you cunts… you could give us contracts that are outside and we’d be able to have a take home that makes it worthwhile whilst you pay no difference.
Instead they moan and hire Accenture instead for 3x the cost for 3x lower skills.
Fuck them.
When companies stop paying what’s essentially pennies to do/have like 3 different specialties in a single role (you can’t expect someone to work efficiently as a full stack engineer, cloud architect AND somehow manage/know essentially intermediate knowledge about DevOps).
It also doesn’t help that on the job training is a lost art on companies outside of like apprentice/internships. Out of all the industries in existence, Tech is the one place you’re guaranteed to find people who learn things quite quickly compared to other industries. Yes, 90% of them, me included, will have the social skills of a rock but we are damn good at what we do!
Don’t even get me started on trying to force Agile methodologies in a software development cycle. That’s a rant for another day 😂
No shortage of talent.
The shortage is in companies with sensible IT systems and reasonable expectations of what programmers can be experts in. If you’re using a platform that 0.1% of developers know and you can’t find staff, maybe try switching to a platform that 10% of developers know instead of bemoaning a ‘lack of talent’.
Employers outside the tech space frequently don’t seem to understand that it’s an employee’s market. They frequently treat their tech employees much like non-tech employees.
This obviously isn’t a bad thing in and of itself but they’re competing with tech companies with flexible hours, fewer hours, WFH, higher pay, great benefits and personal-project time. I went from an SME (in the engineering space) to a massive multinational and they SME just didn’t understand that if they wanted to keep me, they needed to be flexible with me.
The managers were all from manufacturing backgrounds and mandated that you were in your seat writing software bang on with the same shift in the workshop. They captured KPIs like lines of documentation written per hour, lines of code per hour, not understanding that that absolutely isn’t how it works.
I see the same from several of the companies we now work with and I hear it often from the endless bloody linkedin recruiters
They’re obviously free to treat and pay their tech employees however they see fit, but don’t then get surprised when they move on to either a tech company here or abroad for a better time.
​
​
Edit: I should add, there’s nothing “better” about tech employees that mean they should get treated better and one solution would be to treat *all* employees better, but companies just have more competition for their tech employees specifically.
Awesome
Now I can demand astronomical salaries and get away with being unpleasant to recruiters
Can’t be fucked to read the article, but I bet there’s not a shortage of tech talent. I bet there’s just a ton of employers who can’t afford or won’t pay fair salaries for tech talent.
I work in biotech rather than tech tech but I imagine its pretty much exactly the same story. No shortage of talent but companies somehow expect to be able to recruit people with a wide range of globally in-demand skills, working what realistically should be 2 or even 3 jobs worth of responsibilities, working quite a lot of unpaid extra hours, for a salary package that would make a retail middle manager blush.
I have to keep repeating I feel like we’re at a point in this country where unless you wind up in literally one or two distinct sectors like FinTech, you genuinely just might as well not bother upskilling all it does is land you more stressful and demanding work while your salary still flat lines. I don’t understand why this isn’t being seen as a serious issue while we’re talking about developing a “high skill, high wage” economy, its a complete farce.
There’s never a shortage of talent.
There’s only ever a shortage of wages and training opportunities.
Firms need to learn to compete. 15 years of more people than jobs has allowed their HR departments to get flabby.
Pay more, easy. I’m very new to the field but I can tell I’ll be working overtime and doing shit I’m not supposed to just because it falls under IT thus “hardware software networks azure, isn’t it all the same mate?”
I work in IT and i’m currently looking for new opportunities as I don’t feel I am paid fairly for the role I complete. The problem i’m having looking at new roles isn’t even pay because i’m not getting far enough to have that discussion.
Out of all of the jobs that are advertised within an IT capacity, i’d say a good 80% have truly ridiculous job specifications. They advertise these roles out which have enough responsibilities and requirements to cover at least two separate roles, if not more!
They’re quite clearly not going to have any joy recruiting anyone because in their eyes, there’s a tech talent shortage caused by their own prerequisites! If they actually advertised the roles out that would suit the workload of one person, they’d be interviewing people left, right and centre!
Eh, I know a senior support/projects IT team which is currently hiring at a good rate locally – 40k. But the guys I know are on 32 and 35k respectively, and have been offered 5% increases. So of course they’re looking to leave, and the company ends up with a shortage of expertise.
I swear if HR ever worked out that perhaps treating external recruitment differently from internal recruitment is a massive mistake, half the issues they have would vanish.
Edit – should add that I’ve just jumped ship for a 10% rise amongst other better benefits and am leaving the local office with no IT support at all. The absolute state of HR these days
As one of the “tech talent” I guess, I am considering leaving the UK for the horrible state of politics. I can get a job probably anywhere, probably higher paying. Also the recent exodus from london due to WFH and rent hikes in my city arent helping.
I wonder where all the talent went :/
The businesses that pay more and get the talent will thrive, those that hold out for more cheap immigrant labour to exploit will die, there are no problems here.
They don’t pay very well at entry level, yet still demand years of experience.
We get offers we can’t refuse from other countries, visa included. Wilier governments than ours are taking full advantage of the brain drain: Brexit was the best thing ever to happen to the Canadian tech industry.
Amsterdam is a much better choice for anyone wanting a European base now: they speak better English than we do, it’s in the EU and it’s on the continent proper.
These articles are meant to prepare people for loosening immigration rules to admit cheap tech workforce from 3rd world countries (read about overton window).
There is no talent shortage, just corporations boasting about billions in profits offer shit pay and are upset nobody wants to work for them.
They now lobby politicians to give in and bring in cheap workforce.
Of course we will pay for this – more queues to your GP, higher rents etc.
only so that big corporations can save millions.
Not this again.
There is NO UK talent shortage in tech.
What we have is a ton of employers not willing to pay for the skills they need.
There’s no shortage, you just have to pay. Remote working means that local companies hoping to get cheap devs now have to compete with companies listed on the NYSE who can afford to pay twice as much.
The pay for tech staff has to keep rising, but getting senior mnagement to agree to that is the main issue. The less they spend on experienced staff = more profit made.
“An apprenticeship is a fantastic way to achieve that. Not just for young people, but also those looking to upskill.”
Lol. Yeh, if you live with your parents. A lot of people are willing to financially struggle to upskill, but nobody can live on 6K a year. I don’t know why the government doesn’t allow all apprentices to be on universal credit, for the first year of the apprenticeship (when the pay is less than min wage). Subsidising their income to reach min wage would still be cheaper than paying unemployed people, but you upskill people so they have more reliable work and they’re less likely to be unemployed in the future. Right now, if you take an apprenticeship you’re going to be taking a risk, because until you start the job you won’t know if you’ll be able to get universal credit to survive or not.
**”tech talent shortage**” is corporate speak for “employees who refuse pay well below their market value”
The only shortage here is the amount of £ companies are willing to pay out, small violin anyone?
There’s a weird disconnect in this thread… Everyone seems to think we’re losing all of our talent to the Bay Area and Dubai, but that just isn’t true.
We’re suffering from a lack of available talent, not applicants.
The tl;dr is – university is so prohibitively expensive now, and engineering courses have such a high drop out rate that we simply aren’t creating the talent needed to power these industries.
The other side of the coin is Brexit and the VISA backlog making it a nightmare to get non-natives into role in a reasonable amount of time.
London is still the most popular city for tech in the world and yet we’ve decided to give ourselves a shotgun to the foot in the form of a slack jawed electorate that are happy to vote these people out of jobs and then complain about the upshot.
Fuck ’em.
Yeah, maybe if you’re both good and lucky enough you’ll be on £300k in 20 years, who’s to say by that time £300k doesn’t mean you’re house sharing with 7 strangers.
Saying 40k meant that was crazy 10 years ago.